Coronavirus outbreak

[pawl]

Well from what I heard most the holiday airlines cancelled all flights till June.
TUI and other big operators are not selling dates untill June as well. Even if you use regular flights most of the hotels in the mediterranean are not opening till June
Plenty of places are already not planing to open this year at all.

Tui rep told me it is based on a guesstimate, basically they dont want to have a go again at millions of cancellation so playing it safe (in their opinion)

We have decided that we won’t go away this year.If things have improved may consider taking our pre Xmas trip to York.

 

[kingrollo]

Just seen Jet2 intends to start holiday flights again from June 1

Do they know something we don’t?
.

I think if they advertised holidays much earlier ...they wouldn't get many takers ?

Is it feasible you book a flight/hotel in June and it goes ahead ? - right now Just about IMO - but I wont be booking.

 

[kingrollo]

It's almost as though government sources want to leak nonsense to the Mail in order to stoke conspiracy theories as a way to deflect attention from government failures in handling the pandemic.

Yep if the UK looks like the worst in Europe - you watch Rabb and co lay into Spain and Italy's counting methods.

 

[marshmella]

Just seen Jet2 intends to start holiday flights again from June 1

Do they know something we don’t?
.

It's the 17th of June we had the email yesterday we.were booked to go to Zante on the 6th so thats not happening.

 

[Buck]

I’m not thinking we’ll have normality by June. Things may have changed but it’s only 6 weeks away and i feel it’d be naive to to think otherwise.

 

[Unkraut]

I think that provides your answer about the legitimacy of this as a source (it is drawing on the Mail on Sunday)

There are plenty of Mail on Sunday readers who are still fixated with comparing this virus with the flu. It's enough to make you despair. The don't get why the lockdown is necessary and simply moan about the government restricting what they can do.

Whatever the origin of the virus this is irrelevant to what needs to be done to counteract it, and it strikes me speculating about this is simply a waste of time at present.

 

[slowmotion]

There are plenty of Mail on Sunday readers who are still fixated with comparing this virus with the flu. It's enough to make you despair. The don't get why the lockdown is necessary and simply moan about the government restricting what they can do.

Whatever the origin of the virus this is irrelevant to what needs to be done to counteract it, and it strikes me speculating about this is simply a waste of time at present.

Hang about! The parishioners on CycleChat are world-renowned experts at wild speculation.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

it strikes me speculating about this is simply a waste of time at present.

Not if you're deliberately trying to deflect attention from other things, it isn't

 

[Unkraut]

Hang about! The parishioners on CycleChat are world-renowned experts at wild speculation.

That's different ...

 

[Wobblers]

This article says the virus shows no sign of being genetically engineered and did not escape from a lab,
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html

But that is not exactly what was being alleged. The species jump from bats to humans could have occurred by natural mutation in the laboratory, or when the researchers are out and about collecting them. To research bat viruses, it is useful to have diseased bats.

Since SARS, there has been much research into coronaviruses - because virologists have suspected that if coronaviruses could jump species and infect humans once, it was likely that this would happen again. In light of that, it's best to try and understand as much as possible about them, so as to find out ways to reduce the chances of human infection and find ways to deal with them.

MERS and now SARS-CoV-2 have shown that their suspicions were all too accurate. This is the thing - we already have two examples where a coronavirus jumped species into humans without the assistance of laboratories. Furthermore, there occur thousands of chances every day of cross-species infection outside of a lab. We know that coronaviruses can do this by themselves. They have far more opportunity to do so outside of a lab. It is far more likely that this arose in some chance encounter in some marketplace.

 

[Wobblers]

It would appear there is some testing of those not hospitalised, although it may be restricted to NHS Staff. Eldest daughter was tested today. She is a Nurse Practitioner. Test was positive. So far, symptoms very mild.

Yes, they're finally getting round to testing NHS staff, and not before time. I wish your daughter all the best, and that it stays very mild.

 

[Wobblers]

Because they haven’t got the amount of ‘fuel’ of certain European territories ( nor has the U.K.) The U.K. is looking like it’s flattened the curve, so where that lot got the idea that the U.K. will be the worst hit Euro territory is beyond me. An American organisation was trying to float a figure of 66000 total U.K. deaths, which is even more laughable. 20000 deaths in total would be considered a touch, and at the current trajectory, the U.K. will be no where near that figure ( it should be considerably lower). Sweden decided to tell the politicians to sit back and shut up, and let the scientific experts deal with the nitty gritty. So far, it’s paid off.

Can I borrow your crystal ball, please? It'll save me actually having to do any work such as squander time getting that pesky data needed for my next paper. I'm certainly not going to hazard a guess as to the ultimate number of deaths as there is jst too many variables, and we are still far too early into this outbreak to make any meaningful guess. Note that even that US group ran models multiple times and got results that ranged between 14,500 and 219,000. The reported figure was just the average (and the Guardian doesn't even say whether or not this was the median or mean - I thought it was supposed to be a quality paper?). Such variability indicates these sort of predictions are of limited use.

What I can say is the UK is doing significantly worse than Italy and France (and Spain, but I haven't plotted the Spanish numbers below):

Currently, we're doing worse than any major European country. We will be fortunate if our ultimate number of deaths is similar to that of Italy.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Since SARS, there has been much research into coronaviruses - because virologists have suspected that if coronaviruses could jump species and infect humans once, it was likely that this would happen again. In light of that, it's best to try and understand as much as possible about them, so as to find out ways to reduce the chances of human infection and find ways to deal with them.

MERS and now SAR-CoV2-19 have shown that their suspicions were all too accurate. This is the thing - we already have two examples where a coronavirus jumped species into humans without the assistance of laboratories. Furthermore, there occur thousands of chances every day of cross-species infection outside of a lab. We know that coronaviruses can do this by themselves. They have far more opportunity to do so outside of a lab. It is far more likely that this arose in some chance encounter in some marketplace.

Maybe, but the Chinese authorities allege that the virus transferred to a human in the Wuhan sea market. So it's not just a chance encounter in some marketplace, but a chance encounter in a specific marketplace, which coincidentally is just down the road from one of their virus labs.

It is totally understandable that the Chinese would want to research Coronaviruses in light of SARS and MERS. I am not suggesting the virus was engineered or deliberately let loose. I am saying that it seems at least as likely the virus transferred to humans in the course of their virus research than it did from their wet market.

I have read that the virus may have transferred from bats to pangolins and then from pangolins to humans. Alright, I don't know, do lots of Pangolins suffer from Coronavirus? In any event, that is two species the virus has to jump. Bats to humans is only one.

 

[Eziemnaik]

Some more reading for the bored
Yet to be peer reviewed
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022434v2

 

[DCLane]

@MarkF - be careful out there

SWMBO's in full PPE kit as well when she's seeing patients.